Risk disclosure
Trading crypto-assets, currencies, shares and other financial instruments carries financial risk, including the partial or complete loss of the amount you invest. This page explains, in plain language, the ten risk areas that matter most to anyone using an automated trading platform. Please read it before making your first deposit, and revisit it whenever your circumstances change.
Nothing on this page is formal financial advice, and nothing in it should be read as a promise of any outcome. What it is, honestly and completely, is our best description of what can go wrong and what you can do about each thing.
The short version
Markets can move against any strategy, automation included. You could lose some or all of your deposit. Only fund an account with money you could afford to lose without changing your life.
Where to get help
Your personal manager can talk through any item on this page before you deposit. Email [email protected] at any time, and read the FAQ for quick answers.
Eight risk types, explained honestly
Each card names the risk, what it looks like in practice, and one practical step that reduces it.
1. Market risk and volatility
Prices of digital assets, currencies and shares rise and fall, sometimes sharply and within minutes. News, regulation, large trades and shifts in sentiment all move markets, and no analysis model, including ours, can fully predict these moves. A strategy that performed well over recent months can lose money next week, and automated systems act on those same unpredictable markets.
What helps: set exposure you are comfortable with, use the volatility pause settings, and judge results over months rather than days.
2. Liquidity risk and slippage
Liquidity is how easily a position can be bought or sold near the price you see. In thin or fast markets, the price at which an order actually executes can differ from the displayed price, a difference called slippage. During extreme moves, orders may queue, partially fill, or fill at noticeably worse prices, which increases losses or reduces gains.
What helps: major instruments are more liquid than obscure ones; our strategies weight toward liquid markets, and you can avoid adding new capital in the middle of a violent move.
3. Connection and API integrations
The platform connects to external venues and data providers through interfaces that can suffer outages, delays or configuration mistakes. A misconfigured permission, an expired key or a temporary outage can interrupt trading at an awkward moment. No connection is perfectly reliable, and actions may be missed or executed late.
What helps: never share your login or connection keys with anyone, review the connected services listed in your account, and tell support immediately if a connection shows an error.
4. Counterparty and custody risk
Trading and custody of some assets involve third parties such as exchanges, brokers and payment providers. If a third party faces insolvency, an outage, or a security incident, your positions or funds held with that party can be affected, and recovery may be slow or partial. Diversification across providers reduces but never removes this exposure.
What helps: keep only your working capital on trading venues, withdraw profits you do not need in the market, and ask your manager which providers stand behind each service you use.
5. Operational and technical risk
Software has defects, and infrastructure has bad days. Bugs, failed updates, hardware faults and connectivity problems can suspend trading, distort displayed information, or delay your actions. We test and monitor continuously, but no technology platform, ours included, can promise uninterrupted faultless operation.
What helps: verify important figures in your account statements rather than a single screen, and report anything that looks wrong rather than assuming it will fix itself.
6. Cyber-security and phishing
Criminal attempts to steal accounts and data are a constant reality for every financial service. Phishing emails, cloned websites and fake support callers are the most common. If someone obtains your credentials, they can act in your name, change withdrawal details, or drain your balance. We describe the protections we apply on the Security page; your own vigilance is the other half.
What helps: use two-factor authentication, a unique password, and treat any unsolicited contact asking for codes or passwords as hostile, whatever brand it claims.
7. Model and automation limits
Our analysis engine is built on statistical models, and every model has limits. It can misread unusual conditions, react to patterns that dissolve, or sit out moves it should have caught. Automation repeats its rules without human doubt, which is both its strength and its weakness, and past behaviour of a strategy says nothing certain about the future. No configuration of the platform eliminates the possibility of loss.
What helps: treat strategy history as context, not a promise; understand roughly what your chosen strategy does before you fund it, and keep the guardrails honest.
8. Service availability
The platform undergoes maintenance and can be affected by events outside our control, from data-centre incidents to wider internet disruptions. During downtime you may be unable to view positions, change settings, or request withdrawals until service is restored. Markets keep moving while any platform is down, and strategies resume from the state they find, not the state you last saw.
What helps: keep your verification and contact details current so we can reach you, and set risk pauses before outages become a live concern rather than after.
Before you start
Five habits that put you in the strongest position on day one.
Understand the strategy you select
Ask your manager to explain, in one paragraph, what your chosen strategy buys, how long it holds, and what its worst observed period looked like. If you cannot explain it to a friend over coffee, you are not ready to fund it.
Decide your acceptable loss in writing
Before depositing, write down the amount whose complete loss would not change your plans. That number, not ambition, sets your deposit. Revisit it each time your circumstances change: a new job, a mortgage, a family change.
Protect the account itself
Turn on two-factor authentication on day one, use a password you use nowhere else, and check the login history in your account monthly. Security hygiene costs minutes and prevents the one risk you control completely.
Keep watching the strategies
Automation removes the workload, not the responsibility. Read the monthly report, compare it with your expectations, and pause any strategy whose behaviour stops matching what you signed up for. Staying informed is your right and your job.
A closing word on sizing
If you remember one paragraph from this page, make it this one. The single biggest difference between a member who rides out a bad month and one who leaves the platform angry is the size of the first deposit relative to their savings. Markets do not negotiate, and neither does arithmetic: at half your savings, a twenty percent drawdown is a life event; at a tenth, it is a bad fortnight. Start smaller than feels impressive, add only from money the platform has already returned to you, and you give every strategy the one thing it cannot generate internally, which is time to work.
And when you are unsure, ask. Your personal manager has walked hundreds of New Zealanders through exactly this page, and there is no question about risk too basic to put to them. Deciding with your eyes open is the entire point of the disclosure you have just read.
Still have questions about risk?
Your personal manager will answer them before you deposit anything, with no pressure and no sales pitch. That conversation is part of the service, not a favour.